aside. “Please come in. My wife is in the living room.”
Flynn stepped forward before Zoe could, and she ended up trailing along behind him, navigating an entrance hall and then turning right into a wider room filled with a sofa, two armchairs, a coffee table, a television, and various storage units. Zoe took a seat on one of the chairs, glad to be able to distance herself from the other humans in the room—but watched, perplexed, as Flynn settled himself right next to Carlo’s wife.
“Agent Aiden Flynn,” he reintroduced himself, showing his badge and offering her a gentle smile. “You are Mr. Vega’s wife, I take it?”
She nodded. “Taylor, please,” she said. She was about three years younger than her husband, blonde and pretty, still slim. Zoe felt something in her stomach tighten. She couldn’t think about Shelley. Not now.
As Carlo settled himself into the remaining empty armchair, Flynn looked between husband and wife, his voice quiet and friendly as he spoke. “Can you tell me if Mrs. Vega had any problems that might have led to someone wanting to take revenge? Any enemies, neighborly disputes, rivals at work?”
Carlo shook his head vehemently, one-two-three quick as a whip from side to side. “No. My mother was a good woman.”
“She really was,” Taylor put in. “I know all of the old jokes about mothers-in-law, but I got lucky. She was calm and kind. Dedicated to her work and her son. That’s all.”
Flynn nodded. “I understand. But even within her work, you can’t think of anyone who might have been jealous or angry with her? Maybe a theory she managed to disprove, or someone who was trying to get to certain observations first?”
Carlo and Taylor exchanged puzzled glances, both shaking their heads. For a moment, Zoe was lost in the hypnotic rhythm, the way they shook their heads toward each other and then away in unconscious tempo. Timing in sync. “She was respected in her field,” Carlo said. “She was getting older. She planned to retire within the next few years. Why would anyone want to take her out now when they could simply wait?”
“A few years is a long time,” Flynn pointed out.
“Not in astronomy,” Carlo said, with a light chuckle in spite of the tragedy of the circumstance. “Do you know how often comets come around? Some events take hundreds of years to repeat. And the solar system out there is there forever, or at least for long enough that none of us will be remembered by the time it is no more. A few years in astronomy is the blink of an eye. Mom always said that.”
Zoe didn’t need the numbers to help her count what was going on here: zero leads. Not a single one.
She pulled her focus together to ask a question of her own, sensing that Flynn was beginning to flounder. His last pause had gone on for eight seconds—too many; not the result of a natural pause in conversation. “Does pi mean anything to you, in connection with your mother?” Zoe asked. “Do you know if she was working on anything to do with pi, or saw any particular significance in it?”
Carlo frowned, looking at his wife for confirmation; her expression was blank, if a little puzzled. “I don’t know. Pie? Like what you eat?”
“The mathematical symbol,” Zoe clarified.
There was a momentary widening of Carlo’s eyes, which Zoe measured and leaned toward, thinking this was a sign of recognition, of understanding. There was going to be a reveal now, that pi was at the center of all of this and Elara Vega was specially chosen as a target, and everything was going to fall into place and they would be on the plane home at the end of the day.
“I can’t think of anything like that,” Carlo said, shaking his head slowly. His eyes had returned to their normal size, then even narrowed in a squint. “What does that have to do with anything?”
Beside Zoe, Flynn made an impatient noise and shifted. The symbol carved into the bodies was part of their holdback for now; information that only the killer and the investigators knew. If someone came forward and confessed, or brought up the carving somehow, they would know that it was the killer for sure. But Zoe knew from experience that they could only keep it to themselves for so long. Sooner or later, probably sooner, it would be smart to put the full details into a report for the national database, which would